There was a period — maybe six months in — when I genuinely believed I was getting better every day. I was putting in the hours. Every night in whatever hotel room I was in, I’d work through my routines. Smooth, confident, unhurried. The deck felt like an extension of my hand. Things that used to take concentration now happened almost without thought.
I thought that was the point.
It wasn’t.
What I was doing, as Anders Ericsson’s research makes devastatingly clear, wasn’t practice at all. It was performance in an empty room. And performance in an empty room, no matter how many hours you log, does not make you better. It makes you more comfortable. Which is not the same thing.
The Automaticity Trap
The brain is extraordinarily efficient. When you repeat an action enough times, it gets automated — moved from conscious control to the basal ganglia, where it runs on something close to autopilot. This is wonderful for survival. It’s a disaster for skill development.
Because the moment something becomes automatic, the cognitive engagement required to do it drops to near zero. And it’s that cognitive engagement — that focused, attentive effort to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be — that actually drives improvement.
Ericsson spent decades studying elite performers across domains: chess grandmasters, violin virtuosos, Olympic athletes, surgeons. The finding that stopped me cold was this: the amount of time spent in practice is a poor predictor of performance. What matters is the quality of that practice. Specifically, whether the practice involves deliberate effort to improve, or merely repetition of what’s already mastered.
Most people plateau not because they lack talent, not because they’ve reached some genetic ceiling, but because they stopped practicing and started performing. They confused fluency with excellence.
I was fluent. I was nowhere near excellent.
What Autopilot Actually Feels Like
The trap is seductive because automatic performance feels good. Things flow. You’re not straining. The moves come out clean. You finish a run-through and think, yes, that was solid.
It is solid. It’s exactly as solid as it was yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that.
I remember a specific evening in a hotel in Linz, working through a card routine I’d been doing for months. It went perfectly. Smooth, sharp, completely controlled. I felt like I was cruising.
And then I asked myself: what did I just work on?
I couldn’t answer. Not because I’d forgotten — but because I hadn’t been working on anything. I’d just… done the thing. Gone through the motions at performance speed, without any specific target, without any part of my mind genuinely straining to close a gap.
The session lasted forty-five minutes. As a practice session, it was worth approximately zero.
The Plateau and What It Tells You
Most people experience the plateau as a vague, demoralizing feeling of being stuck. Things don’t seem to be improving. The motivation dips. The temptation is to push through, to practice more, to add volume.
This is exactly wrong.
More repetition of an automated skill is not more practice. It’s more of nothing. The plateau isn’t a ceiling you need to push through — it’s a signal. It’s your nervous system telling you: this is no longer challenging. Find the next hard thing.
The problem is that finding the next hard thing is uncomfortable. That’s the point. If it weren’t uncomfortable, it would already be automatic.
Ericsson’s concept of deliberate practice requires you to operate at the edge of your current ability — the zone where you’re making mistakes, where things don’t always come out clean, where concentration is high and fluency is low. That zone is unpleasant. It feels like struggling. Most people, when faced with a choice between the comfort of smooth repetition and the discomfort of genuine stretching, choose comfort.
I chose comfort for six months without realizing it.
The Wake-Up Call
What snapped me out of it was embarrassingly simple: I recorded myself.
Not for the first time. But this time I watched it with a specific question in mind: what is actually wrong with this? Not “is it good enough?” but “what’s wrong?”
I found things. Small things, but they were there. A moment where my eyes went to my hands. A pause that was slightly too long in the wrong place. A gesture that had crept in somewhere and didn’t belong. A point in the routine where I was marginally off rhythm.
None of these things were visible to a casual observer. But they were visible to me, and more importantly, they were things I could work on.
That’s when I understood what practice actually is. It’s identifying the specific gap between where you are and where you want to be, then working on that gap. Not the whole routine. The gap.
Working on Gaps, Not Routines
Once I started seeing my practice this way, the structure of my hotel room sessions changed completely.
Instead of running through routines, I started by identifying one thing. One specific element that wasn’t quite right. Maybe it was a particular moment where I wanted the timing to feel more natural. Maybe it was a transition that felt slightly mechanical. Maybe it was the way I reset — too obviously, too deliberately.
Then I’d work on just that. Not the whole routine. Not even the section around it. Just the specific gap.
Sometimes that meant slowing down to a speed that felt almost comical — no longer performance speed, but examination speed. Sometimes it meant doing the same moment fifty times in a row with full attention on what I was trying to change. Sometimes it meant making it harder — introducing variations, distractions, deliberate disruptions to the automatic pattern.
It was uncomfortable. It felt like not being good at something I was supposed to be good at.
That discomfort, it turns out, is exactly what improvement feels like.
The Paradox of Fluency
Here’s the cruel irony: the better you get at something, the harder it becomes to practice it correctly. The more automatic a skill becomes, the more effort it takes to consciously engage with the parts that aren’t yet at the level you want.
This is why elite performers spend so much time on fundamentals. Not because they’ve forgotten them, but because they know that fundamentals can always be refined, and refining them requires re-engaging with things that would otherwise run on autopilot.
A chess grandmaster doesn’t study openings because they don’t know them. They study openings because there’s always a deeper level of understanding available, and accessing it requires treating the known as unknown again.
For me, this meant going back to basics I thought I’d mastered. Sitting with a deck, working on things I could do in my sleep — but doing them consciously, with attention, looking for the millimeter of improvement I’d stopped looking for.
The sessions felt slower. More frustrating. Less satisfying in the moment.
But the month after that, when I watched recordings again, the gap between where I’d been and where I was had genuinely closed.
What This Changed
I no longer measure the quality of a practice session by how smooth it went. Smooth usually means I wasn’t really practicing.
I measure it by: did I find a gap? Did I work on it? Did something become slightly less automatic, slightly more conscious, in a way that signals genuine recalibration?
The uncomfortable sessions — the ones where things didn’t come out clean, where I was struggling, where I finished feeling slightly frustrated — those are almost always the productive ones.
The smooth sessions, the ones that feel like a satisfying run-through, those are performances. They have their place. But I don’t confuse them with improvement anymore.
If your practice always feels good, you’re probably not practicing.
The practice-revolution series continues with the next uncomfortable truth Ericsson had waiting for me.